vSphere 5 Lab Hosts – A Year Later

So I have had my lab hosts for about a year. I have to say that they have done pretty well. Because of the cost I configured these hosts with 16GB of RAM each. At the time I built them, 8GB sticks of RAM were about $250 a piece, which was a little bit out of my price range. I recently found some 8GB Kingston memory that wasn’t going to break the bank, and give me the ability to do more than I have been able to.

The initial configuration included the following components, and cost around $1,650 ($825/host) not counting shipping/etc.

So in just over 12 months, to build 2 systems exactly as I did in 2011, it would cost me $182 less, or $91 a host less.

The biggest changes in prices between 2011 & 2012 are the SSD drives and RAM cost. Drive prices always drop (until there is a flood somewhere) and RAM prices seem to drop to a point, then become expensive again when the demand drops.

Keep in mind that these hosts cost what they do, because they are server boards and ECC RAM is being used. I really wanted iKVM access, as well as remote turn on, which these boards provide. I also have a complement of 5 useable NICs, which may or may not be necessary, depending on what you want to do with the lab.

The budget configuration could still be expanded to 32GB of RAM, additional NICs could be added (remember 3 useable onboard), and a SSD drive could be added for vSphere 5’s Host Cache feature. The Intel Pentium G620 processors support VT, but not VT-d, and don’t have nearly the same horsepower as the E3-1230’s. But in a year of using the lab, only seldom do I ever get to a point where CPU is a point of contention.

Do you think that G620 CPU has any feature differences? I want to use this lab for full VCP5 exam prep so want to make sure all features are available, do you see any problem if I use this CPU instead of the original one you quoted in your other blog?

Just wanted to say a big thanks for putting these articles up for those of us wanting to do whitebox VMWare installs! One question – I ordered basically your whole 2012 setup (Tyan MB, E3-1230, Kingston ECC 8GBx2, Rosewill R379-M, Athena cable) and I am getting a blinking green LED on Tyan and no power at all. I figure either I have borked the front panel wiring since the Tyan header pins aren’t clearly defined in the manual, or the comment about the “other” power adapter cable means that the Athena isn’t the right one and I need the Rosewill in Kevin’s post. What’s the proper panel-to-header wiring and does the Athena ATX/EPS work with this config? Thanks again!

Great… the Tyan manual is a little obtuse about the pinouts. That got the fans spinning up but then I had a loud repetitive beep beep beep. After playing around with several combinations of memory and USB keyboards, none of which relieved the beeping, I plugged into the network using the IPMI jack (the RJ45 above the USB ports on the IO shield). The IPMI interface pulled an IP address, which I was able to harvest from my router. Then using the IPMI web interface to update the BIOS – the board was shipped with 2.0 which doesn’t support Ivy Bridge CPUs such as your recommended E3-1230. After updating BIOS to 2.01b from the Tyan website, I am good to go!

Great that really helped since the Tyan manual is pretty vague about the fact that all the pins should just line up on the outer edge of that J20 header. That got me to a point where the board and the fans would power up but give a constant beep beep beep. After swapping out memory and USB keyboards etc., I decided to give the IPMI a go. The IPMI jack is the RJ45 by itself above the USB ports on the IO shield. The router gave it an IP address, which I collected from the router interface. Then I browsed to the IPMI menu, updated the BIOS from the Tyan website (it shipped with 2.0 which doesn’t support Ivy Bridge and I’m using the E3-1230), and now I am good to go!

vSphere 5.5 End of General Support

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